Quotes by Mark Lawrence

All the best secrets are told at night.

For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I’d not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.

Still, perhaps thats all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.

Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.

Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name— Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.

Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.

Its shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction Id never suffered from.

Gomsts mouth framed a no, but every other muscle in him said yes. Youd think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all.

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again.

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will. He held out his hand, palm open. Free will has to be taken, I said.

It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.

Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!

A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.